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Re:Ubuntu Linux

Installed ubuntu over a week ago, so far so good. Didn&#039;t know about that rootless schpill so I got in through grub, you know safe mode or whatever. In single user mode set user password and everythings is fine.

Only thing about ubuntu is that the Xorgs xv module doesn&#039;t seem to work too well. For instance when playing back video with the xv driver the video will display a blank image. Other than that this is the perfect distro for me. Plays very well with my old hardware, I&#039;m getting respectable (~30+)fps on zsnes as where slackware I got ~20 fps.

Re:Ubuntu Linux

i&#039;m installing it right now, it came highly recomended, so i&#039;m blowing away my slack 10 and giving this a shot

hope i&#039;m not making a mistake, it took me a long time to get slack the way i like it.......

Edit:

Well i&#039;m posting from it right now. I had no problems with any hardware, found my touch pad, X worked without editing, Mozilla fired right up, i&#039;m just checking things out right now but it looks ok to me. I&#039;m just not crazy about Gnome maybe i&#039;ll d/l kde and use that.

Re:Ubuntu Linux

Ok I got xorg going on it with xcompmgr. For those of you who want to give this a shot, it&#039;s not for the faint of heart.

Step 1: Install Ubuntu.
Step 2: Upgrade everything to the latest version.
Step 3: Make sure that you&#039;re at a stage where you can compile metacity from source (this is important!). Also make sure you have all the libraries you want to include (like startup notification, etc...compositing support will come with xorg, but you probably don&#039;t want that)
Step 4: Grab the xorg sources from freedesktop.org
Step 5: Compile sources
Step 6: Get pissed off when it complains about missing dev libraries. Go to debian.org and search the packages for whatever file it can&#039;t find, and install that dev package.
Step 7: Repeat Steps 5 and 6 about 10 times.
Step 8: sudo make install &amp;&amp; sudo cp /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Step 9: For NVidia users only: do an &quot;apt-cache search nvidia&quot; and install anything that looks like it may be relevant. You&#039;ll definitely need nvidia-common and nvidia-glx. You may have to kill X...the only way I could figure out how to do this was to edit /etc/inittab and make the default run level 3, and then remove the file /etc/rc3.d/S99gdm...that got me a terminal login.
Step 10: Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment out the line &quot;Load dri&quot;, the &quot;DRI&quot; section, and change &quot;driver nv&quot; to &quot;driver nvidia&quot;. I also had to comment out the line &quot;Load GLCore&quot; but I&#039;ve never had to do this in the past. Now under the line &quot;Driver nvidia&quot;, add the line &#039;Option &quot;RenderAccel&quot; &quot;True&quot;&#039;. Finally, at the end of the config file, add the following lines:

Step 11: Restart X and pray.
Step 12: If all went well you should be looking at a relatively sluggish X11 desktop that&#039;s damn unstable. To fix this, grab xcompmgr from freedesktop.org&#039;s cvs as per this tutorial:http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=204593 . When you try to compile it, it will probably yell at you and give you a bunch of errors. It crapped out when I did ./autogen.sh, when I did ./configure --prefix=/usr, and when I did make but at each stage it did what it was supposed to even though it complained. At the end of make you should have an &quot;xcompmgr&quot; binary in the working directory.
Step 13: Run the following command: xcompmgr -CcFf -D 5 &amp;. Watch what happens
Step 14: Now if you&#039;re using the default metacity you should notice it sucking like a cheerleader on prom night. That&#039;s because the default metacity that comes with Ubuntu is compiled with support for the composite extension built in, and its compositor (which is buggy as shit) is fighting with xcompmgr. Here&#039;s where you recompile metacity without compositor support. Recompile, make install, and killall metacity &amp;&amp; metacity &amp;.

Voila. Drop shadows, transparency, fading windows. It&#039;s more stable than it was a few weeks ago too....quite usable if you ask me.

Unfortunately I didn&#039;t realize that I&#039;d have to recompile metacity so now I&#039;m stuck using Openbox for a while. Definitely not digging it

EDIT: Just got Metacity back up and running. If you want to use Metacity, you will have to grab the 2.8.2 sources from ftp.gnome.org. Metacity 2.8.3 can&#039;t be built, and 2.8.4 makes some changes to compositing that don&#039;t seem to play nice with xorg on debian. If your title bars are all transparent and ugly as sin, you&#039;ll need Metacity version 2.8.2 with compositing turned off.